Was in the woods all weekend hunting for these: Any guesses? No fair for you midwestern guys to tell!
yup, morels. We went out for 3 days, seems to be a little early yet. The kids found several pounds but we old duffers used our secret mystical hippy ways and found a couple of pounds on our own. The spring woodland flowers were pretty trippy, too. Hoped that the rattlesnakes were up, but it's still too chilly up here for 'em. Did find some nice deer's teeth though. Yes, those alien brains (or testicles) are good fried in butter with a little rosé and some fresh ground pepper. Good raw in salads, too.
Theres a difference between colors of Morels that poxysntixels and geotaro picked. Is there a difference in texture, flavor or tenderness? Or maybe different location, different color?
Nope. Don't do much GPS myself and the valley we were in is mostly a dead zone, phone-wise. The variety of coloration is a mystery to me; I think they might be varieties within the species. We have 3 distinct colorations up here; the yellowish that I shot, a black and white variety that is neither so dark nor so contrasty as geo's and a very light, almost white tan. We're trying to find out if that's a varietal issue or if it's based on local environment differences. They all seem to taste the same and the dark ones seem to be a little more firm, the yellows a bit more crumbly. Are the morels out west associated with dead elm patches?
I was kidding about the GPS. We do have a couple of sites GPS tagged on our property ("morel hill" etc.), but know where we will find them now anyway. These locations are closely guarded secrets, so if someone asked me for the GPS coordinates, I would just laugh. Don't know about out west, but we do seem to find our morels near living elms... though that may just be a coincidence because there are elms all over the place. Also, they seem to favor the southern facing slopes.
Yup, elms, southern etc. Found out today from a teaching cook that the morels in the west are a different variety; often called "burn" or "burn-over" morels because they tend to come up after forest fires... evidently common in NW coast, or so I heard today
Yes, there are people that keep track of forest fires just to go looking for morels on the area that burned later.
They are scrumptious... Plus the thrill of the hunt when stalking wild shrooms compares to stalking wild toys.
